


Día de los Deadlords

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen, Holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 17:45:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8455909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: Apple cider, candy, and little Deadlords running through the streets. Just another holiday in Jugdral as the mundane world and the spirit realm collide in strange ways on Devil's Night.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This began with a joke post on loptyrofjugdral's tumblr and I couldn't resist. The story quickly went from "ha-ha funny" to "dear lord no" funny. Spoilers for FE5... in a sense, if you already know what's up. Actual spoilers down in the bottom part of the notes.

_29 October_

_The custom of the harvest festival as celebrated in the Manster District does not exist in the rural southeast of the peninsula. When I asked about harvest celebrations I received blank stares from the villagers here and a refrain of “Ain’t (sic) nothing to celebrate.” Instead autumnal folk traditions have accreted around the festival of All Saints’ Day, making it both a holy day as we observe in the North and a time of revelry and…_

Finn paused, the nib of his pen suspended above the open journal, as he searched for a word that might convey the spirit of this “holiday” without overt condemnation for the practice.

_Mischief._

-x-

Downstairs the living space looked more like a workshop, every surface littered with scraps of red and purple fabric and fragments of pasteboard. Eyvel kept an ear out for trouble as the children worked on their costumes even as her hands were busy rolling out a pan’s worth of bread-people.

“No, Lord Leif! You don’t get a fancy helmet if you’re going as a thief.”

Eyvel smiled as fiesty little Nanna reminded her “brother” that he’d have to make do with a cloak over his head while the girls sported pasteboard helmets to evoke ancient warrior-demons. Shortly thereafter, Leif burst into the kitchen, looking not-especially menacing in his cloak.

“Eyvel, how can I scare anyone if they won’t let me wear a helmet? Everyone can see that it’s me.”

“Sometimes, Lord Leif, you have to get a little creative with the resources you have at hand,” Eyvel said, and she placed a dab of flour at the end of Leif’s nose.

He gazed up at with puzzled eyes for a moment, then made the connection between the flour and the sickly tint of Eyvel’s dusty hands. Even as the prince rubbed at his nose, a broad smile spread across his face. He could, at such times, look a young rascal.

-x- 

  
_30 October_

_The week before All Saints’ Day is, as one might expect, a time of reflection in which graves and altars are tended and freshened with flowers and thoughts turn to those that have passed before. The eve of All Saints’ itself is, in its most innocent form, a night in which the souls of dead children come back seeking the warmth and love of the living, and must be placated with sweets. In less benign traditions, the gates of hell open from dusk to dawn and demons walk among the people. All children and many adults thus wear costumes so that the visiting demons will take them for fellow members of the infernal undead and so leave them be._

It didn’t sound any less ridiculous on the page than it did in his head, Finn thought. Possibly the concept sounded even worse.

_In an effort to appear suitably demonic, children often play pranks on adults, at times going to far as to set vacant buildings on fire. Thus All Saints’ Eve in these parts of Thracia has the name Devil’s Night._

-x-

Eyvel and Finn saw to it that the children spent the morning prior to All Saints’ Eve cleaning the graves in Fiana’s small cemetery. Nanna set about pulling weeds, Mareeta swept in front of tombs with gusto, and Lord Leif placed bunches of bright flowers on the graves with surprising delicacy. As they worked alongside the other children of Fiana, Eyvel had a chance to catch up with some of the other parents… not all of whom were looking forward to Devil’s Night.

“Caught Orsin with a cache of rotten apples and confiscated them all,” grumbled Colte. “Wonder whose windows he was planning to break.”

Eyvel looked over at Colte’s son, who did have a sullen air as he raked the sad patch of the cemetery lawn.

“Did you forbid him from any merriment tomorrow?”

“No, because Halvan vouched for him and said they were only planning to use the apples for cider.”

The boys’ alibi made Eyvel smile but she made a note to talk to Halvan about this supposed hobby. If the boys were planning to start jacking when the frost came it might be a sad winter for everyone.

When the cemetery plot was clean and festive as the children could make it, Eyvel invited them all to her home for fresh cider and the chance to decorate the pan of bread-people, which in turn gave her the opportunity to warn the village boys about the dangers of jacking and bad cider.

When Eyvel judged the collection of finished bread-people she praised Mareeta for her diligence in painting small squiggles of frosting and Nanna for her pleasing use of color.

“But whose are these?” she asked of the ones that were, clearly, the prettiest work on the table.

“Lord Leif,” Mareeta and Nanna said in one voice, and they sounded proud of him.

Leif showed a bit of pink in his cheeks but he wasn’t able to hide that he was indeed proud of himself for excelling at such an intricate task. Eyvel, knowing full well what the rest of the village didn’t, wondered what this boy might become in the world if fate didn’t demand of him to be a king.

-x-

_31 October_

_Here in rural Thracia, the blessed Crusader Nova has been distorted into the figure of “The Weeping One” who wanders the earth on All Saint’s Eve and calls to her side the lost children of peasants. Likewise Crusader Dain is celebrated not for his acts against the Loptyrian Empire for his apocryphal battle with the Devil._

_I should not be surprised that tales of the Crusaders have turned to pure myth in only a few generations, but as foolish as these myths do sound on first hearing, perhaps there is some deeper truth to be found in them. Alongside these strange stories of Queen Nova and King Dain, one finds the most vivid folk recollections of Emperor Galle’s servants, the Deadlords._

-x-

By sundown on Devil’s Night, all was ready. Eyvel had bowls of sweets at hand for the both the “lost children” wandering the Thracian wilds and the living ones who’d be romping through the streets of Fiana in the guise of Deadlords. She had a fine meal, including the decorated bread-people, laid out on her table for Colte and any other village adults who might come by, but first she decided to check on the person under her roof who hadn’t been excited about tonight’s festivities.

“Finn? I know this isn’t exactly your kind of holiday, but are you planning to come down? The children are excited to show off their costumes.”

And he came downstairs, looking politely interested and bearing a stack of small slips of paper the size of playing cards.

“What are these?”

“I thought if you were giving out candy to the children we might also give them something to last beyond tonight,” he said, and showed her the slips of paper. On each one, he’d drawn The Weeping One, kneeling at prayer in her halo and crown, a small child praying alongside her. On the back of the sketch was a little prayer, carefully inscribed. “I don’t know how many children here can read but I thought they’d like the picture.”

Eyvel wasn’t entirely sure what to say to this and settled on, “That’s remarkable. I didn’t realize you could draw so well.”

“I once practiced long days at drawing a single rose just to please someone,” he replied, looking down at the stack of cards. “Sometimes persistence can make up for lack of talent. Not often, but sometimes.”

Into this strange moment crashed three rampaging Deadlords— Bovis in a towering helm and waving a broad pasteboard sword, Anguilla in elaborate pasteboard armor with a hobbyhorse and a slim sword glittering with dark “jewels,” and Porcus the thief with mussed hair and flour paste smeared on his face.

“Most people don’t set fires, do they?” asked Finn once the trio of little demons had been sent off into the twilight.

“Bonfires? Yes. House fires… not anymore. We got that under control a few years back,  said Eyvel, meaning mostly that _she_ had gotten the unfortunate tendency of the locals to celebrate Devil’s Night with arson under control.

“That’s a relief,” said Finn, and said relief was so clear in his voice that Eyvel wondered if, quite possibly, the composed and reserved knight of the Lost Kingdom might not be, in truth, afraid of fire.

But she wasn’t going to ask and the demonic hordes were now at her doorstep. Eyvel knew it was little Tanya from the mountains in the guise of fearsome Tigris the Demon Warrior but she pretended to be surprised and frightened anyway. After a visit from a few more varieties of Deadlord and one boy dressed as Crusader Dain with his Devil-killing Heaven Lance, Eyvel decided to get a little more into the spirit. A dusting of flour on her own face and her most tattered set of outerwear fixed that.

“Which Deadlord are you supposed to be?” asked Finn.

“I don’t know. Which one haven’t I seen yet? There was a Mus running around, and a Simia…” And then Eyvel remembered a worn-out bow confiscated from a bandit some weeks back. “Ah, that’ll work!”

So it was the guise of Draco the Archer she adopted that night. On seeing her with the bow, Finn looked back at her with something close to horror, and Eyvel assumed her improvised costume was a success. Several of the children visiting her door likewise seemed afraid, especially the younger ones.

“Sweets for lost souls!” The girl, younger than Nanna, had a high bell-like voice as she rapped on Eyvel’s door. Eyvel opened the door, expecting to give this small child a fright, and instead she was the one taking a step back from the threshold. The little girl, done up as the dread shaman Canis, had a strange pallid glow to her face and long streaming hair. Eyvel wondered if the girl’s parents had placed some enchantment on her for the night.

“Thank you,” said the eerie voice once the sweets landed in her basket. The “shaman” flitted back to the company of a man with red hair in a strange sort of topknot, and Eyvel was glad to see them both disappear.

As much effort as Fiana put into Devil’s Night, it was still a small village and when Eyvel’s three little Deadlords came back well before midnight, stuffed with candy and apples and old Sabha’s cider donuts, her adult guests had already gone back to their homes to tend to their own children.

“You frightened me, Mother, with your face done up like that,” said Bovis/Mareeta as she added some extra donuts (“for Lady Eyvel and her guest, with love from Sabha”) to the feast on the table. “We’re supposed to be scaring you, not the other way around.”

So Eyvel, with only a little regret, washed off the improvised face-paint while Finn took charge of converting the Deadlords back into regular children and sending them to bed with the hope that everyone had their inner demon vanquished because there would be _church tomorrow_. She finished with her task long before Finn came downstairs and so she enjoyed one of Sabha’s donuts with some of the marigold-infused liqueur that Colte brought over, and then began to tidy up the excess of empty cups, dessert plates, candy wrappers and more. She noticed a slip of paper on the windowsill by a candle and took it for one of Finn’s prayer-cards, most of which had gone to little demons along with handfuls of candy. But the writing, while in the same neat hand as on the back of the prayer-cards, said something entirely different.

“For Altena,” she said aloud, and noticed now that a handful of sweets and a marigold blossom were tucked beneath the paper. She turned away from that quiet All Saints’ Eve offering to one particular lost child and left the candle burning. When All Saints’ Day dawned and order was restored to the world, the sweets and flower and paper all were gone, and Eyvel never breathed a word about it.

**Author's Note:**

> So, unraveling this...  
> Mareeta is dressed as Bovis, who equates to Zwei, the Deadlord her biodad Galzus can become in FE5. Tanya is Tigris aka Drei, the Deadlord her father Dagdar can become. Leif is Porcus aka Zwolf, the Deadlord made from Lifis the thief in both a "Leif the Thief" reference and a nod towards one of the FE5 Deadlords. Nanna is Anguilla, who has no significance other than she's a mounted female unit in FE13. Little Sara is Canis aka Elf, the same Deadlord she can become in FE5, while Eyvel is inadvertently dressing as the Deadlord made out of *her* in FE5. 
> 
> The idea of the spirits of dead/lost children being part of the holiday is inspired by the "angelitos" of the Dia de Los Muertes but also references the Thracian practice of simply abandon unwanted children, which I'm sure works its way into the culture and lore in some fashion. The idea of Dain fighting the actual devil comes of a villager's line about Dain fighting "the devil himself" which may indicate the commoners have a slightly different take on the Dark Lord.
> 
> I live in Detroit where "Devil's Night" is an actual thing, "celebrated" by setting abandoned buildings on fire. I have participated in the anti-arson patrols, so while it's not as bad as it used to be, it's a pretty crazy, uh, holiday.


End file.
